Melbourne Then and Now

Back in 2013, the Director of the NGV, Tony Ellwood, promised that the vast exhibition of the art and design of the metropolis Melbourne Now would return in a decade. Now it has.

Installation view of Design Wall on display as part of the Melbourne Now. Photo: Peter Bennetts

Back then, the exhibition included both spaces in NGV Australia and the temporary exhibition space at NGV International. Now it is only in the NGV Australia at Fed Square.

Back then, I was invited to the opening of Melbourne Now 2013 (see my post). Now, although about a thousand people were at the official launch on Thursday 24th, I’ve been left off such invitation lists for years.

Back then, it was desperate to make the exhibition interactive. It seemed like every artist in the show had been asked if they could make their work interactive, from sticking on birds to a Juan Ford landscape or sketching Julia Deville’s taxidermy creations. Now there are still sketching areas and other viewer interactions in the exhibition, but it is more restrained.

Back then, I was concerned with how street art and graffiti would be represented in the exhibition and how Melbourne’s demographics were represented. Now I’m interested in the curators’ interpretation of what has changed in the last decade.

Back then, it was all living artists. Now it includes some of the artists who have died in the last decade. This appears to go against the exhibition’s meaning, for if ‘now’ mean anything, it does not mean ‘not now’. However, for the NGV, “Melbourne Now” is just a series of letters with no intrinsic meaning, just a title for a series of exhibitions. But this only raises the question of why include only some of the artists that have died and not all. (A similar degree of curatorial linguistic flexibility was applied by the “Gallery of Victoria” to the location of “Melbourne” in both exhibitions.)

Back then, I might have been one of a few online voices writing about the arts in Melbourne. Now I have to wonder what to write when there are already six reviews of it in Memo. Cameron Hurst points out the supersize of the works in the show designed to fill the white spaces. https://memoreview.net/reviews/melbourne-now-2023-by-cameron-hurst Chelsea Hopper examines the sound and music and complains about how it leaks in the gallery. https://memoreview.net/reviews/melbourne-now-2023-by-chelsea-hopper, Which leads neatly to Giles Fielke pleading for the NGV to have a proper cinema. https://memoreview.net/reviews/melbourne-now-2023-by-giles-fielke Amelia Winata writes about the artists in the exhibition hoping to get into the NGV’s permanent collection. https://memoreview.net/reviews/melbourne-now-2023-by-amelia-winata (In her examination of the free market aspects, she could have included the emails from the usual commercial galleries boasting about the inclusion of artists they represent. If there was a conflict of interest statement anywhere, I missed it.) Paris Lettau looks at some of the young artists in the exhibition. https://memoreview.net/reviews/melbourne-now-2023-by-paris-lettau And Tristen Harwood presents Calia O’Rourke and Indi Jennings’s “younger/fresher/more energetic take”. https://memoreview.net/reviews/melbourne-now-2023-by-tristen-harwood-indi-jennings-and-calia-o-rourke 

So that was Melbourne Now. Back then and now.

Kait James, The KLF (Koori Liberation Front). Photo: Black Mark

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The Temple of Boom

As a teenager, I thought the third-scale Parthenon of Calton Hill overlooking Edinburgh was the wankiest construction I’d ever seen. Intended as a memorial to the  Napoleonic War and to emphasise Edinburgh’s claim to be “the Athens of the north”, it failed at both. So I’m not sure about another one of the same scale in the NGV’s sculpture garden.

As a symbol of western slave-ownership delusional exceptionalism, the Parthenon is best not remembered for its white sun-bleached marble but as a painted temple. Given this, I prefer the Temple of Boom to the one in Edinburgh.

The Temple of Boom is the 2022 NGV Architecture Commission and was designed by Melbourne-based architects Adam Newman and Kelvin Tsang. It is a semi-complete classical Greek-style temple constructed around the Henry Moore sculpture. It is not a temple to Athena, for Moore’s figure is an Aphrodite or a Hera, not Athena.

I wasn’t there for the architecture, the Friday night DJ sets or the VR experience of the Acropolis in Greece. I was there to see what guest curated by Toby Benador of Just Another Agency had arranged for the painting of the temple.

I’ve seen art by two artists on Melbourne’s streets: Drez’s vibrant colours and Manda Lane’s black and white vegetation. Manda painted with a brush which she does paint with a brush on the street when she isn’t doing paste-ups. And finally, there is the luxurious floral art of David Lee Pereira, whose work I’ve seen at Beinart Gallery.

The Temple of Boom served these artists well. Street and mural artists have a close and important relationship with their surfaces’ architecture, which is different from how other artists might relate to the surface they are painting. It is also temporary, ephemeral work for which they are well suited. The tree branch from the NGV’s garden grows into the temple, mixing with the built environment like a reverse of Pereira’s painting.

I’m interested in how street artists work in gallery settings. Within the gallery cage’s confines, the wild art will start to exhibit domesticated behaviour. It is kind of a litmus test for art galleries; are they an anaesthetic environment for art or institutions of colonial appropriation? Not that the Temple of Boom is either of these, it is a play space.

I didn’t see it with music playing, and I was there at a quiet time of day.

Protesting at the NGV

In Extinction Rebellion’s most recent exhibition at the NGV, two activists glued their hands to the bulletproof acrylic covering over a Picasso painting, Massacre in Korea. (See the ABC News report and read Dr Catherine Strong, a spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion on the reasons for the protest.) It is part of a tradition of protests at the gallery that goes back to Ivan Durrant’s Slaughtered cow happening in 1975.

Hijacking a state-owned platform to make an emergency broadcast about the climate catastrophe seems fair. Especially given the number of times the state government has used the NGV to promote its message. Part of the function of a state art gallery is to portray the state as cultured and reasonable even when they are cruel and destructive.

This is not the first time that Extinction Rebellion has used the NGV. In 2019 Extinction Rebellion held a Last Supper, a dinner party as sea levels rise with a table floating in the gallery’s moat.

Here is a timeline of some of the other protests at the NGV this century. (Please let me know of other protests at the NGV that I’ve missed in this short time line.)

In 2005 a young artist, Lucas Maddock, navigated a boat made of salvaged scraps in the NGV’s moat to protest the Australian government’s treatment of refugees for a video work titled Refugee. The video was exhibited in an exhibition of VCA students’ work at the Margaret Lawrence Gallery. (See Art Right Now)

In 2012 street artist CDH’s Trojan Petition was dumped in the forecourt and taken inside the gallery for display. (See my post) 

In 2017 Picasso’s Weeping Woman was covered with a black veil in a protest against Wilson Security. (See ABC News)  Also, in 2017, red dye was added to the water wall and moat in the campaign by artists again in protest against the NGV employing Wilson Security who “violently enforcing the imprisonment of refugees and people seeking asylum in Australia’s offshore immigration detention centres”.

No art was damaged in any of these protests, only the pride of the NGVs security.

Deaccessioning is part of collecting

The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) website tells me that it has “over 65,000 artworks spanning thousands of years”, but it doesn’t tell me why. To what purpose have they put together this collection. National (state) art galleries are like their counterparts in the computer game Civilisation. Collect the set in your city to advance to the next level. The purpose of these institutions was to provide education and, failing that, an alternative leisure activity, infotainment. Major galleries become part of tourism with destination architecture; the Guggenheim in New York and Bibloa are paradigm examples. These institutions are about providing a tourist attraction in a spectacle based economy.

Jeff Koons, Venus 2016-20 at the NGV

I haven’t seen a full acquisition policy for the NGV, but it gets mentioned in passing in some of its annual reports. A proper acquisition policy would be transparent, accessible to the public, and include a deaccession policy.

However, deaccessioning is almost a forbidden topic of discussion in Australia; consider the following statements. “Deaccessioning is crazy”, declared John Payne, Senior Conservator of Paintings at the NGV, at a talk (Saturday 13 October 2012, Johnston Collection). And when Joe Eisenberg, former director of NERAM in Armidale and now head of MRAG, was asked by Anna Waldman what he thinks about deaccessioning? (Art Monthly Australia, June 2015, p.25)

“Don’t believe in it – Armidale has actually sold some works that I collected, and tears well in my eyes just saying a thing. A curator’s or director’s choice is just that, and because times and tastes change, you don’t sell off their selections. Most major Australian galleries clean-out the storeroom every so often, and I think that is criminal. It should all remain part of the collection to represent an important piece acquired at a specific time and place.”

The assumption that the collection has been acquired legally and ethically is being challenged in the post-colonial world. The conservative anti-deaccessioning position wants to keep the collection as a treasure horde regardless of its acquisition. If a state gallery can make mistakes about provenance, it can also make mistakes about aesthetic merit or historical importance. Their accession policy is not error-free, and deaccessioning is part of the process of correction.

Another assumption is that the acquisition choices are based solely on artistic quality and not popularity or displays of political allegiance. “Does the object lack sufficient aesthetic merit or art historical importance to warrant retention?” (Assoc of Art Museum Directors’ position paper on deaccessioning) 

The giant KAWS statues at the NGV, Bendigo and Pt Leo Estate Sculpture Park were not acquired because the directors thought they were great art. Instead, they claim that the popularity of KAWS will attract new visitors to the gallery. If this were true, would it be appropriate to sell these statues when his popularity declines and before the market crashes? But this is not the case because these institutions also support the neo-liberal idea that private ownership of art is the cornerstone of the art world. By retaining the work in their collection they will endorses the value of those owned by private collectors. 

This again raises the question of the purpose of the gallery’s collection. Supporting private collectors? Displaying part of a treasure horde? Playing some game of interstate rivalry? Not knowing the purpose of your collection is crazy. Not deaccessioning is crazy.

Temporary replica of Keith Haring’s painting on the NGV’s waterwall 2019

Framed reviewed

One of the most mysterious art crimes is the theft and ransom of Picasso’s Weeping Woman from the NGV in Melbourne. Not a lot is known about it apart from some ransom notes sent by the thieves. The painting was returned undamaged after being held by the Australian Cultural Terrorists. So SBS’s four-part documentary was always going to be a stretch.

The various commentators on Framed tell us many contradictory things. That the NGV was amongst the best art galleries in the world and then that it had aircon and security problems at the time. That staff loved that NGV Director, Patrick McCaughey, and that the docents went on strike after he took away their chairs. That Arts and Police Minister, Race Matthews, was good for the arts and that he was pompous. And many guesses at who did the crime while explaining how damaging this was to the people implicated. 

Framed frames people from perennial favourites to secret cabals of art insiders and other wild theories. It then looks at the damage that wild accusations cause. The program presented about five, including Ashley Crawford’s pure speculation, McCaughey’s biography and the anonymous letter sent to Virginia Trioli. And why do all these wild theories assume that it was a man who stole the painting? Why not a woman? If they wanted to go wild, they could have asked Trioli if she stole it; after all, she has written about being involved in stealing the bronze dog, Larry La Trobe.

Part of the mystery of the theft of the Weeping Woman is that it is a very different kind of crime. And it has become a genre of stories, very creative non-fiction in autobiographies and speculations from authoritative sources. As everybody wants to solve the mystery themselves.

Framed doesn’t frame the cubist painting regarding the politics in Australia’s historical relationship to modern art. What it symbolised to the NGV and a “philistine country” (to use McCaughey’s own words). TV is good at setting the scene, and the program includes lots of shots of Melbourne in the early 1980s and McCaughey in different coloured bow ties. Unfortunately, there is not the same background about the painting or Picasso.

Instead of presenting unprovable speculations, the program could have shown more details and context about art crimes. Although it briefly examines art forgery, it doesn’t look at art theft in any great detail and even less about art theft for ransom.

Would someone steal art to get better security for the gallery? Were there art thieves in Australia who could smuggle stolen paintings out of the country? What happens in other art for ransom theft in Australia? And why did the police drain the NGV’s moat in their search? I answer these questions that Framed doesn’t in my yet unpublished book on Australian art crimes. 

Incidentally, presenter Marc Fennell asked the questions when I was a contestant on Mastermind.

Picasso, The Weeping Woman

Maree Clarke’s Ancestral Memories

My main reason to go to the NGV was to see Maree Clarke solo retrospective, “Ancestral Memories”, but I saw another exhibition before – “We Change the World”. After all the world needs to change. However, this is a tracksuit of an exhibition theme, comfortable, shapeless, and accommodating almost anything. The work is from the NGV collection, a random selection including Julian Opie, David Hockney, Guerrilla Girls, and Maree Clarke… (Why Clarke when there is her solo exhibition in the next gallery?)

Maree Clarke, Maree Clarke 2012, inkjet print (image courtesy of NGV)

“Ancestral Memories” is the subtitle of the Maree Clarke exhibition; it was also the title of her exhibition at the University of Melbourne Old Quad in 2019. For ancestral memories are the material that Clarke works with. (Please read my blog post reviewing that exhibition, Clarke’s role as a culture worker, and why she is an important local artist.)

This Yorta Yorta / Wamba Wamba / Mutti Mutti / Boonwurrung woman has been reclaiming and revived many south-east Australian Aboriginal art and cultural practices, including possum skin cloaks to kangaroo tooth necklaces. At the NGV her work is display alongside historical material from Museum Victoria, clearly illustrating how she is reviving her culture. Before Clarke, there were less than a dozen possum skin cloaks in existence, all from the nineteenth century. After Clarke, the number of possum skin cloaks is increasing because she, along with other collaborators, brought the practice back to life.

It is a sombre exhibition with black painted walls. Much of the exhibition is about mourning, another form of ancestral memory. One of the slightly lighter notes is the series of photographic holograms of still life, including native flowers and kitsch Aboriginal Australiana. As Clarke looks from the ancestral memories to a future, including new technology and materials along the way.

This exhibition follows on from the NGV’s retrospective for Bindi Cole; more retrospectives for Indigenous woman artists are a welcome trend.

Australian Art Terrorists

A few Australian groups have acted or threatened to take action outside of the law to achieve artistic and cultural objectives. Most are right-wing conservatives — so much for the so-called ‘cancel culture’ of the left.

A.C.T. target Picasso’s Weeping Woman

In 2003 the Revolutionary Council for the Removal of Bad Art in Public Places threatened to destroy a number of pieces of public art. That the “spokesman, Dave Jarvoo, told The Australian newspaper” about the threat speaks to the conservative taste of this so-called Revolutionary Council. The fact is that they were all talk and no action, and the spuriously named, Dave Jarvoo appears to be the only member of this organisation. 

Their targets were modern sculptures Fairfield Industrial Dog Object and in Sydney; Ken Unsworth’s Stones Against the Sky ‘poo sticks’ in Kings Cross and Brett Whiteley’s Almost Once giant matches behind the Art Gallery of NSW. David Fickling for The Guardian came up with several more deserving targets in Sydney (see his article), and I could do the same for Melbourne (perhaps in another post). (Thanks to Vetti Live in Northcote for drawing my attention to the Revolutionary Council for the Removal of Bad Art in Public Places.)

The Australian Cultural Terrorists (aka A.C.T.) stole Picasso’s Weeping Woman from the NGV, held it to ransom and then returned it undamaged. They seem to have twice as many members as Dave Jarvoo’s Revolutionary Council; at least one man and, maybe, one woman. They were more successful than the Revolutionary Council but, perhaps, no more radical given their demands for more art prizes for local artists. They had no follow up aside from stories that the following year they also wrote some  libellous letters about people in Australia’s art world. The A.C.T. wrote lots of jeering, satirical letters, several of them attacking state Arts Minister, Race Mathews.

To this list, we could add the Catholic Church for their attack on Andre Serrano’s Piss Christ in the NGV. Graffiti writers, like Pork, that cap and tag as a form of conquest and censorship. And BUGA-UP, graffiti to stop tobacco advertising, vigilantes with a specific type of art, selling a particular message in mind, not exactly the artistic kind but still ‘art’ in the advertising copy sense.

Revolutionary Council target Fairfield Industrial Dog Object